CURATING IMMERSIVE WORLDS: AI VISIONS, SPATIAL NARRATIVE, AND SPECULATIVE MEDIA ARCHITECTURES

A rethinking of the New Media Architectures (NMA) conceptual framework emerges as media arts research and technology continue to evolve through a series of curatorial investigations situated at the intersection of art, design, education, and immersive virtual environments (IVE) research. This presentation explores a journey through the language of experimental media design practices and speculative spatial systems that examine the future of artistic production, technological and sensory culture, and interdisciplinary research.

The presentation frames an Art, Architecture, and Media Arts & Sciences research practice grounded in immersive design-engineered environments, computational worldmaking practices, and augmented media curatorial experiments. A range of creative research collaborations will be discussed, from investigations developed through the AlloSphere Research Facility to exhibition and community engagement initiatives presented through ACM SIGGRAPH conferences. The presentation will also reflect on a continuing series of online dialogues initiated at the beginning of the pandemic that explored AI, architecture, emerging media cultures, and science, organized in collaboration with Digital Futures.

Gustavo Alfonso Rincon, Ph.D., is educated as an architect, artist, curator, and media arts & design-engineering research scholar. He is an advocate for education and research as a human right. His academic and creative work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, while his professional practice has served clients across the globe.

His dissertation, Shaping Space as Information: A Conceptual Framework for New Media Architectures, investigates the limits and possibilities of immersive virtual environments (IVEs) for real-time arts–science research and creative practice. As a curator, educator, and research practitioner, Rincon continues to develop experimental media exhibitions with the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community (DAC), alongside online programming initiatives supporting Digital Futures International.

Rincon is affiliated with the Media Arts and Technology Program, where he contributes to curatorial and research initiatives in collaboration with Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, the inventor of the AlloSphere Research Facility, which is housed inside the CNSI at UCSB.

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JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, PhD, Director and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility and Distinguished Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music (Composition), in the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Also is the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology at UCSB.

Kuchera-Morin’s research focuses on composition,creative computational systems, content, and facilities design. Her 35 years of experience in digital media research led to the creation of a multi-million dollar sponsored research program for the University of California—the Digital Media Innovation Program. She was Chief Scientist of the Program from 1998 to 2003. The culmination of her creativity and research is the AlloSphere, a 30-foot diameter, 3-story high metal cylinder inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive/interactive scientific/artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets.

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Kon Hyong Kim, PhD, is a researcher and media artist specializing in immersive virtual environments and projection-based virtual reality systems. His work focuses on developing and optimizing highly immersive VR experiences, blending cutting-edge technology with interactive design to push the boundaries of how humans engage with digital environments.

His research contributed to a range of topics such as large-scale immersive displays, real-time interactive systems, and neurological spatial perception. His scholarly work reflects a deep engagement with both the technical and experiential aspects of virtual reality. He helped engineer the AlloSphere, one of the most prominent VR facilities in the world, and developed various multimedia software systems such as allolib.

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Joshua Dickinson is a programmer and computational artist interested in blurring the boundary between humans and machines. He received a BA in music composition from Columbia University in 2010 and an MS in Multimedia Engineering from the Media Art and Technology department at UC Santa Barbara in 2013. His research centers around human-computer interaction, cultural analytics, computer vision, and the exploration of large or otherwise unique datasets. He enjoys trying to digitally quantify and simulate things we normally consider very “organic,” hopefully as a way of getting closer to what actually makes us human.

In 2012 he founded Unfiltered Audio, a company that has released dozens of instruments and effects used throughout the music industry. In 2023 he founded SoundLabs.ai, dedicated to pushing the boundaries of human creativity through novel generative AI algorithms. SoundLabs has formed a research-partnership with Universal Music, with which they created a Spanish language AI recreation of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee, a first in the industry and featured in Rolling Stone Magazine.

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VISUALIZING DURATION: A QUANTUM PERSPECTIVE

This presentation offers an artist’s perspective on the fascinating interplay between science and fine art, particularly exploring the roles of duration, observer, chance, and uncertainty. Throughout the 20th century, radical experimental artists have challenged the fundamental questions brought to the surface by quantum mechanics, highlighting the invisible forces at play. Here, the observer is integral to quantum physics, becoming part of what is observed, shaping the visualisations of the elusive quantum phenomena.

Drawing examples of two artists, Thomas Wilfred, and Takis from the David Bermant Foundation, and artwork from Dr. Paul Thomas’ own practice, he will discuss the concepts of duration from a quantum perspective in connection to related visualising phenomena. The artworks create visual sensations and expressions of the immense complexity of visualising the invisible, ineffable, and intangible.

Dr. Paul Thomas, Honorary Professor at UNSW Art and Design and founder of the Studio for Transdisciplinary Art Research as well as the founder and series-chair of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference series 2010-2022. In 2000 he instigated and was the founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth 2002, 2004 and 2007. As an artist he is a pioneer of transdisciplinary art practice. His practice led research takes not only inspiration from nanoscience and quantum theory, but actually operates there.

Thomas’s internationally exhibited research projects have been based on working with scientists inquiring into specific areas of physics. The current creative practice ‘Quantum Chaos’ artworks in collaboration with the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, UNSW. Publications, Concerning the Quantum in Art (2026), Quantum Art and Uncertainty (2018), Nanoart: The Immateriality of Art (2013).

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New York based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger creates performative installations for both physical and virtual venues. Hentschläger’s works have characteristically been visceral and immersive, as in ZEE, FEED & more recently in FLUX, EKO, SUB and SOL, and are known for their perceptual effects. They challenge an audience psychologically but also offer a meditative respite from the many stresses of today’s life. His representational body of work, like EVER MORE, ORT & MEASURE, suggests a semi-synthetic form of nature, in the Anthropocene. Hentschläger’s work practice embraces experiment and interdisciplinary approach, most prominently displayed in his ephemeral audiovisual environments and live shows in between fine arts, music and theater.

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ANDREA RASSELL is a filmmaker, media artist and creative researcher in science art. She creates documentaries and moving image installations that explore technological mediation and the multisensory perception of the sub-molecular realm. Her work has been shown at the New York Imagine Science Festival, Oaxaca FilmFest in Mexico, the New Zealand International Film Festival, White Night in Australia and Sónar+D in Spain. Andrea was the 2019 recipient of the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s Synapse residency. She has been a Research Fellow at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia and a Creative and Performance Leadership Fellow at the Curtin HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch).

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BILL SEAMAN is a media artist and a computational media researcher. He is pioneer in the field of interactive media. In particular, his PhD (1999) explored emergent meaning production in a specific generative virtual environment. This research focused on new forms of highly complex interactive generative computation and related articulated visualization. He began collaborating from the mid 1980s with media computer scientists / programmers, articulating new experimental forms of interactive media production. He has collaborated on a number of Art/Science publications and projects. In 2021 Seaman was awarded a lifetime achievement award from ACM SIGGRAPH for his pioneering work in “Recombinant Poetics / Recombinant Informatics / Neosentience.”

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Directed by: Mimi Garrard
Music: Jose Halac
Dancer: Cynthia Koppe
Costume: Mindy Nelson

SHAPING EXPERIMENTAL ARTS 1982-2025

CAROL PARKINSON, Executive Director of Harvestworks, NY, for 37 years since 1987, has focused on the development of experimental artworks that explore sound, data, and other emerging technologies. Parkinson’s professional services include panel participation at the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Parkinson is the Executive Producer of the New York Electronic Art Festival, a series of workshops, concert performances, and exhibitions centered on art and technology. Parkinson is a founding member of TELLUS, the Audio Cassette Magazine, a cassette–based magazine of experimental music and sound art published between 1982 and 1996.

In her talk, Shaping the Experimental Media Arts in New York City, former Executive Director and current Board Member Carol Parkinson will discuss works from artists in the collection, including Blue Morph by Victoria Vesna in the New York Electronic Art Festival (2011), Alan Rath in The Interactive Show (1992), and Christian Marclay in SoundWave NYC (1987), as well as a few current exhibitions.

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PAUL GELUSO is the director of Music Technology program at NYU Steinhardt. work focuses on the theoretical, practical, and artistic aspects of sound recording and reproduction. He has been credited as producer, recording engineer, mastering engineer, and/or musician on hundreds of commercially released recordings, including Grammy nominated and Latin Grammy nominated titles and award winning films. His research focusses on new ways to capture, mix, and process immersive audio for playback on multi-channel sound systems, recently co-editing “Immersive Sound: The Art And Science of Binaural and Multi-channel Audio” published by Focal Press-Routledge. He has taught classes in music production and technology at Bard College and the Peabody Institute, in addition to serving as the chief sound engineer at Harvestworks NY for more than 2 decades.

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IVANA DAMA  is a sound artist and researcher holding an MFA from Yale University. She previously graduated from UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture with a degree in Design Media Arts and Digital Humanities. Her current research explores the development of a tool that signals urgency for both social and ecological issues, tracing connections between the two as they often occur simultaneously. Her work has been featured in over thirty group shows, and she has presented solo exhibitions in Portland and Los Angeles. In addition to her artistic practice, she previously served as Assistant Director of the UCLA ArtSci Center and has been a visiting critic and professor in the Sound Art MFA program at Columbia University. Currently, she is the interim director at Harvestworks NY.

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TENDER BODIES: HYBRID MEDIA + VERDANT KIN

Isabel Beavers (they/she) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles working at the intersections of new media, ecology, and collective action. Across artistic production, curatorial practice and teaching, their research challenges us to imagine adaptive climate futures–ones that rely on alternative modes of knowing as structures for living. Embodied and site-specific research are central to their practice through which they have explored Arctic sea ice melt, plant and human adaptation to wildfire in the American west, deep sea mining, the ethics of artificial intelligence, and eco-feminist re-imaginings of Western mythologies.

Beavers’ work on deep sea mining was recently included in Getty’s 2024 PST Art + Science Collide as part of Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean. Beavers is the Artistic Director of Supercollider LA, and the Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow in STS at Harvey Mudd University. Through artistic practice, teaching, and curating, they foster communities of care and experimentation, inviting audiences to sense the unseen and imagine new eco-futures.

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VERA PETUKHOVA  is an independent curator from Minsk, Belarus, currently based in Los Angeles. She is the co-founder of RIP Space, a project space in Downtown LA dedicated to new media, future-oriented practices, and emergent art forms. Her curatorial work focuses on performance, media, experimental practices, futurity, food, and research around sensory and immersion in artistic practice.

She has curated exhibitions at The Bronx Museum, CalArts, Young Curators: New Ideas V at Detroit Art Week, AC Institute, CP Projects Space, and the SVA Gramercy Gallery. She received her MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts in 2017 and has worked with the curatorial teams at Visions2030, Performa, The Kitchen, Northwest Film Forum, and the Tribeca Film Festival. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Hyperallergic and The Art Newspaper, and her writing has appeared in Blouin Artinfo, OnCurating Magazine, and Performa Magazine

MARCELA VIEIRA is cofounder and curator of the art website aarea (www.aarea.co), a curatorial platform founded in 2017 that commissions and exhibits artworks designed especially for the internet. aarea’s activities also extend into a public program of curatorial projects, courses and seminars.

The first internet native art institution in Brazil, aarea has been developing projects in collaboration with other institutions such as Jeu de Paume, São Paulo Biennial, CCA Wattis Institute, Pivô, Macba, Sesc, Pro Helvetia, Salón Nacional de Bogotá, NT2, among others.

With multidisciplinary interests, Marcela is also one of the editors of Revista Rosa and a literary translator (French-Portuguese). She has a PhD in semiotics at the University of Paris 8, in partnership with the University of São Paulo.

Composer JOANN KUCHERA-MORIN is Director and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility and Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on creative computational systems, multi-modal media systems content and facilities design. Her years of experience in digital media research led to the creation of a multi-million dollar sponsored research program for the University of California—the Digital Media Innovation Program. She was Chief Scientist of the Program from 1998 to 2003. The culmination of Professor Kuchera-Morin’s creativity and research is the AlloSphere, a 30-foot diameter, 3-story high metal sphere inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets. Scientifically, the AlloSphere is an instrument for gaining insight and developing bodily intuition about environments into which the body cannot venture—abstract higher-dimensional information spaces, the worlds of the very small or very large, and the realms of the very fast or very slow. Artistically, it is an instrument for the creation and performance of avant-garde new works and the development of new modes and genres of expression and forms of immersion-based entertainment. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin earned a Ph.D. in composition from the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester in 1984.

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FREDERICK JANKA is a queer latinx arts advocate and cultural producer based in Santa Barbara, California, on the unceded traditional lands of the Chumash. He specializes in organizing and fundraising for artists and exhibitions, advocating for the preservation of cultural resources, and centering Black, Brown, and Indigenous solidarity as a practice of healing. With close to 20 years in the contemporary art world, his vast experience in administrative, fundraising, and curatorial roles at galleries, museums, and arts nonprofits in the US and Mexico include Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, SculptureCenter, New Art Dealer’s Alliance and the NADA Art Fair, among others. His current roles include Board President of the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and cohort member of the Readying The Museum initiative.

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Our two co-presenters will be discussing four objects from the David Bermant Foundation Collection: Nam June Paik, Participation TV, 1969; Otto Piene, Light Ballet I; Marcel Duchamp, Rotorelief (optical discs) 1935-1953, edition c. 1965, and Alejandro & Moira Sina, Spinning Shaft 1978, 1983. Drawing connections between these artworks and current and upcoming artworks and projects at the Allosphere and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, including DJ Javier: San Milano Drive (October 2025) and Falling into the Future: Kinetic Art at the Edge of the World (October 2026).

SHANNON KENNEDY is best known in the documentary field as an accomplished editor whose feature credits include award winning films featured on HBO, POV, CBC, BBC, Arte and others. These include films that have been shortlisted, nominated and/or won Emmys, Independent Spirit Awards, Academy Awards, DuPont Awards, and premiered and won awards at prestigious festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Tribeca, Hot Docs, SXSW, the Viennale, Locarno and many more. She’s also been a fellow and an advisor at the Sundance Institute. Shannon has had a parallel career as a visual artist. She’s received numerous grants and fellowships for her experimental photography and film work, including from the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and Creative Capital. Her work has been shown at museums and galleries around the world, including solo shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the St. Louis Art Museum, to name a few. She lives and works outside of Boston.

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MANJARI SHARMA is an internationally recognized LA-based Visual Artist exploring ritual, identity, memory, and mythology. Manjari was born and raised in Mumbai, India, and she uses photography, sound, motion, projection, and collage in her storytelling. Manjari’s project ‘Darshan’ (Published by Nazraeli Press) is a photographic re-imagining of Hindu deities that has garnered her wide critical acclaim. Her works can be found in The New York Times, Vice Magazine, CNN, LA Times, The Huffington Post, and NPR, to name a few, and her projects have been published and exhibited in galleries, museums, and festivals worldwide. Manjari is a proud recipient of the prestigious Pollock Krasner Foundation grant (2024), and her works are in the permanent collection of The MET, MFA, Houston, Carlos Museum, and Birmingham Museum of Art, amongst various private collections.

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